Juliane trusted that they feared humans and were entering the water to hide. Crocodiles basking on the shores slipped silently into the water as she passed. However, here in deeper water, there were new threats. Before each step she had to poke ahead in the sand with a stick, to avoid treading on poisonous sting rays, lying hidden on the bottom.Īs the stream grew into a river, swimming was the only option. ‘I knew I’d perish in the jungle so I stayed in the water.’ Walking in the stream, however, presented one risk more serious than any others. The gash in her shoulder, where flies had laid their eggs was now crawling with maggots. Surprisingly she felt no hunger but as the days passed her health was deteriorating rapidly. ‘Initially, I saw planes circling above me, but after a few days I realised the search had been called off,’ she said. She passed broken fragments from the plane - a wheel, an engine. With no provisions, dressed in the miniskirt she had worn on the plane and wearing just one shoe, she set off through the jungle. She realised her only hope was to follow a little stream of water nearby, trusting that it would eventually lead to a larger river and rescue.
Her parents were biologists and Juliane had grown up in the jungle. No doubt it was her familiarity with the wilderness that enabled her to cope. She was also in shock, lost and totally alone in the Amazon jungle. Staggering to her feet, she assessed her injuries: a fractured bone in the neck, concussion and deep cuts in her leg and back. When Juliane awoke hours later, wet and covered with mud, she was still strapped to her seat. Then, hitting the canopy of trees, she tumbled through a maze of vines which slowed her landing in deep mud.īut surviving the fall, though miraculous in itself, was just the beginning. Secondly, being strapped into a row of seats, she was aware of falling in a spiralling movement, like a maple seed pod. First, the storm had produced a strong updraft from the thunder clouds. In the film, she speculates on a number of factors which may have combined to save her. Somehow, miraculously, Juliane survived that fall from the sky. The seatbelt squeezed my stomach and I couldn’t breathe any more.’ Before she lost consciousness, Juliane saw the dense jungle below, ‘a deep green, like broccoli’, with no clearings for hundreds of miles. ‘I sailed on through the air, then I tumbled into a fall. I was all alone with my row of seats,’ says Juliane. It wasn’t so much that I had left the plane but that the plane had left me. ‘I was suspended in mid-air, still in my scat. Then the plane broke into pieces and suddenly Juliane found herself outside free-falling 30,000 feet. Passengers screamed as baggage flew around the compartment. In the midst of wild turbulence, the plane was struck by lightning and fell into a nosedive. A half hour into the flight they encountered a horrific storm. Juliane had just graduated from high school in Lima, Peru and, with her mother, was flying out to spend Christmas at her father’s research station in the jungle. Twenty-nine years later, Herzog returns to the jungle with Juliane Koepke, now a 46-year-old biologist, and she tells her amazing story on film. In a remarkable documentary, Wings of Hope, German director Werner Herzog re-counts the true story of an eighteen-year-old girl, the sole survivor of a plane crash in the Amazon jungle in 1971.
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